https://fantinuoli.org/ Language Technologies — Innovation, Research & Management en https://fantinuoli.org/blog/the-end-of-translation-and-interpreting-studies-as-we-know-them/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/the-end-of-translation-and-interpreting-studies-as-we-know-them/ Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 People were thinking seriously about translation long before anyone thought of studying it. Cicero, defending his renderings of the Attic orators, already distinguished between translating ut interpres and ut orator — word for word, or sense for sense. Jerome wrestled with the same dilemma in his letter to Pammachius; Luther defended his German Bible against… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/beyond-the-sentence-context-as-input-in-machine-interpreting/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/beyond-the-sentence-context-as-input-in-machine-interpreting/ Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 A few years ago, a machine translation system knew one thing about your sentence: the sentence. No speaker. No purpose. No setting. No memory of the previous turn. Statistical mapping over decontextualised strings, and whatever quality you could squeeze out of that. Today I can hand a live interpreting system the domain, the topic, the… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/choosing-the-right-ai-interpreting-solution-four-takeaways-from-the-gala-panel/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/choosing-the-right-ai-interpreting-solution-four-takeaways-from-the-gala-panel/ Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 I recently had the pleasure of moderating a GALA Interpreting SIG panel on “Choosing the Right AI Interpreting Solution: Challenges and Approaches”. The conversation brought together four perspectives: technology development, research, language services, and the practical deployment of interpreting solutions within a large international organization. Rather than focusing on whether AI interpreting is simply “good”… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/how-universities-are-getting-it-wrong-on-translations-existential-crisis/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/how-universities-are-getting-it-wrong-on-translations-existential-crisis/ Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 About five years ago, I started raising the flag about declining enrolments in translation and interpreting programs, predicting that this trend will continue and spread across regions. At the time, I earned little more than polite dismissal from institutional representatives. Today, it’s becoming common knowledge: enrolments are dropping, everywhere, and the conversation has finally caught… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/moving-away-again-from-hyperspecialisation/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/moving-away-again-from-hyperspecialisation/ Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 I almost didn’t write this article. When I received a last-minute invitation to contribute an essay on training and technology in interpreting, my first instinct was to hesitate. The debate around this topic has become somewhat circular — the same positions, the same arguments — and I wasn’t sure I had anything new to add…. https://fantinuoli.org/blog/interpreting-without-intelligence/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/interpreting-without-intelligence/ Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 What if effective multilingual communication no longer depended on intelligence at all? That is the starting point of my recent paper, Interpreting without intelligence, blind-reviewed and available in open-access format. Its central claim is simple, but unsettling: AI systems may not need to understand language in the human sense in order to perform spoken translation… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/when-translation-becomes-invisible/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/when-translation-becomes-invisible/ Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 This article first appeared in Multilingual Magazine February 2026 How Our Digital Lives Are Becoming Instantly Multilingual For most of my lifetime, translation was a deliberate act. Someone had to decide to translate a book, subtitle a documentary, dub a film, or localize a website. That decision, often invisible to the reader or viewer, determined… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/the-moral-argument-for-language-technologies/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/the-moral-argument-for-language-technologies/ Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 There is something profoundly human in the effort to overcome language barriers. For centuries, linguistic diversity has been a source of beauty, richness, and identity, but also a practical constraint on mutual understanding. In this context, human translation and interpreting have played a crucial role in enabling the circulation of information, scientific discoveries, and ideas… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/human-centered-ai-for-language-technology-a-promising-framework-with-a-reality-check/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/human-centered-ai-for-language-technology-a-promising-framework-with-a-reality-check/ Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 A recent article by Vicent Briva-Iglesias and Sharon O’Brien introduces Human-Centered AI Language Technology (HCAILT), a framework that seeks to translate Ben Shneiderman’s Human-Centered AI paradigm into the specific domain of multilingual communication . The ambition is clear: move beyond abstract ethical slogans and provide a structured model for making AI-powered language technologies more reliable,… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/why-ai-hallucinates-shadows-symbols-and-the-missing-link-to-reality-a-lesson-for-interpreting/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/why-ai-hallucinates-shadows-symbols-and-the-missing-link-to-reality-a-lesson-for-interpreting/ Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 We hear this word everywhere, especially, but not only, from its detractors: AI hallucinations. The word has entered everyday language, often used as a catch-all explanation when an AI system confidently says something wrong. In the most general sense, a hallucination refers to a situation in which an AI system produces information that is not… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/nvidia-just-removed-the-biggest-pain-point-in-voice-ai-and-interpreting-should-pay-attention/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/nvidia-just-removed-the-biggest-pain-point-in-voice-ai-and-interpreting-should-pay-attention/ Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Voice AI has reached a strange level of maturity. Speech recognition is often solid, language models are fluent, and synthetic voices can sound surprisingly natural, at least when you listen to demos. But the moment you interact with most voice systems, the illusion tends to crack, because the problem is no longer raw capability, it… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/25-years-of-research-on-computer-assisted-interpreting-2000-2025-a-quantitative-perspective/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/25-years-of-research-on-computer-assisted-interpreting-2000-2025-a-quantitative-perspective/ Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Computer-assisted interpreting (CAI) has moved from near invisibility to recurring talking point in both research and professional circles. For most of the history of interpreting, the tools of the trade were minimal: a headset, a notepad, and the interpreter’s cognitive skill. Today, however, computational systems increasingly occupy a place, literally and conceptually, within the interpreting… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/trends-2026-in-technology-and-interpreting/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/trends-2026-in-technology-and-interpreting/ Sun, 04 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 At the beginning of 2025, I wrote a post trying to anticipate what the year would bring for technology and interpreting. As usual with predictions, I got some things right and some things wrong. I was right about the increase in interest in AI interpreting. That trend was unmistakable and has only accelerated. I was… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/if-deepfakes-scare-you-machine-interpreting-shouldnt-surprise-you/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/if-deepfakes-scare-you-machine-interpreting-shouldnt-surprise-you/ Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 There is a quiet contradiction in today’s debates about AI and language. Many people insist that machine translation and machine interpreting will never work at a truly high level, at least not anytime soon. At the same time, those very same people express growing alarm about deepfakes: synthetic voices, faces, and videos that are increasingly… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/what-role-can-interpreting-studies-play-in-an-age-of-highly-capable-machines/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/what-role-can-interpreting-studies-play-in-an-age-of-highly-capable-machines/ Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 What role, if any, can interpreting studies play in an era in which machines interpret at human — or even super-human — levels of accuracy? To answer this question, one must first accept a premise that many within the field still resist: machine interpreting will become extremely capable. As a researcher in interpreting studies and… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/new-edited-volume-machine-and-computer-assisted-interpreting/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/new-edited-volume-machine-and-computer-assisted-interpreting/ Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 I am happy to share a new edited volume in Linguistica Antverpiensia entitled Machine and Computer-Assisted Interpreting, which I co-edited with Prof. Xinchao Lu from Beijing Foreign Studies University. The volume is published in open access form — as, in my view, every publication in such a niche domain as interpreting should be. I will… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/the-age-of-ai-music/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/the-age-of-ai-music/ Sun, 14 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Music has always been deeply influenced by technology. From the invention of new instruments to recording techniques, amplification, synthesizers, samplers, and digital audio workstations, technological shifts have repeatedly reshaped how music is created and consumed. This is particularly true over the last forty years or so. Nothing to do with technology and languages? Bear with… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/the-expressiveness-of-voices-in-machine-interpreting/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/the-expressiveness-of-voices-in-machine-interpreting/ Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 A few days ago, I was invited to speak at the Franco-German broadcaster ARTE, where one of the topics on the table was the expressiveness of AI-generated voices. It is a timely subject. Voices generated by machines are approaching a point of near-indistinguishability from human speech. Some critics refuse to believe this, insisting that synthetic… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/real-end-to-end-speech-to-speech-translation-is-among-us/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/real-end-to-end-speech-to-speech-translation-is-among-us/ Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Only a few years ago, end-to-end speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) seemed like one of those technologies that belonged to conference talks and research papers rather than real products. When Google introduced Translatotron in 2019 or META Seamless in 2023, it was a glimpse of what might one day be possible: translating speech directly into speech, without… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/ai-just-swaps-words-rethinking-semantics-in-the-age-of-ai/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/ai-just-swaps-words-rethinking-semantics-in-the-age-of-ai/ Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Machine translation is still often dismissed by translators and interpreters as a simplistic word-swapping device, i.e. an automated dictionary that turns sentence A into sentence B by juggling vocabulary. This argument is used every day to suggest that machine translation is inherently limited and, ultimately, pointless. What’s striking is that this misconception mirrors another widespread… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/is-ai-interpreting-quietly-becoming-normal/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/is-ai-interpreting-quietly-becoming-normal/ Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Last week, I moderated a webinar on AI Adoption in Interpreting Workflows, organised by GALA’s Special Interest Group Interpreting. The aim was modest but necessary: to look at how AI interpreting is actually being used today, and to invite an open discussion among practitioners and stakeholders. To do that, we brought together two viewpoints that… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/what-is-beyond-meta-and-translated-advances-in-supporting-low-resource-languages/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/what-is-beyond-meta-and-translated-advances-in-supporting-low-resource-languages/ Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Two recent announcements — Meta’s Omnilingual ASR and Translated’s Lara 200 Languages — remind us that progress in AI-driven language technology is far from plateauing. Together, they demonstrate how automatic speech recognition and large language models for translation tasks, the two core components of current machine interpreting systems, are being extended to an impressive range… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/interpretbank-asr-3-0-some-thoughts-from-behind-the-scenes/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/interpretbank-asr-3-0-some-thoughts-from-behind-the-scenes/ Wed, 29 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000 A few days ago, we finally released InterpretBank ASR 3.0. This version means a lot to me — not because it’s “new”, but because it feels right — or at least that’s my genuine feeling about it. It took a few years, and a few wrong turns, to get here. But I think the wait… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/german-chancellor-announces-ai-to-translate-in-the-european-parliament/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/german-chancellor-announces-ai-to-translate-in-the-european-parliament/ Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000 When asked recently about Spain’s request to make Catalan, Basque and Galician official languages of the European Union, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz offered a confident answer: “I believe that even in the medium term there is a very good solution: one day, thanks to artificial intelligence, we will no longer need interpreters. We will be… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/why-the-next-big-wave-of-innovation-may-be-hyperlocal/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/why-the-next-big-wave-of-innovation-may-be-hyperlocal/ Sat, 11 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000 In the fast-moving world of artificial intelligence, speech translation is often portrayed as a race already won by a handful of global titans. Meta, Google, Microsoft, Zoom, and a few others have built astonishing systems capable of turning speech from one language into another almost instantly. Around them, a constellation of specialized companies — KUDO,… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/giving-ai-interpreters-eyes-why-visual-grounding-matters/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/giving-ai-interpreters-eyes-why-visual-grounding-matters/ Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000 At this year’s AMTA 2025 conference, I presented some research on a simple but overlooked question: what happens when AI interpreters can not only listen, but also see? Today’s machine interpreting systems, i.e. a specific form of speech-to-speech translation for immediate use, work remarkably well. They can turn spoken sentences in one language into spoken… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/beyond-conferences-unlocking-the-potential-of-ai-in-public-service-interpreting/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/beyond-conferences-unlocking-the-potential-of-ai-in-public-service-interpreting/ Fri, 26 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000 When discussions about AI in interpreting arise, they almost always focus on conference interpreting: multilingual summits, corporate meetings, or international events. This focus is unsurprising: conference interpreting is highly visible and associated with prestige, as in the UN or the EU. Yet this emphasis has created a blind spot, both in the practical reality, but… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/2025-the-year-machine-interpreting-went-mainstream/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/2025-the-year-machine-interpreting-went-mainstream/ Thu, 18 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000 With Zoom, Apple, and Google jumping in, real-time translation is becoming as ordinary as Wi-Fi. Technologies rarely need to be perfect to change the world. They simply need to be everywhere. Smartphones, cloud storage, and video calls all followed this path: flawed at first, but once they became ubiquitous, their shortcomings mattered less than their… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/what-is-a-super-human-ai-interpreter/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/what-is-a-super-human-ai-interpreter/ Fri, 12 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Discussions about artificial intelligence (AI) in interpreting usually revolve around two scenarios: using AI to support human interpreters or developing machine interpreting systems capable of delivering acceptable results on their own. Many stakeholders still doubt whether AI interpreters are realistic at all, while others already accept them as an emerging reality. A smaller group has… https://fantinuoli.org/blog/reducing-latency-in-simultaneous-machine-interpreting-with-llms/ https://fantinuoli.org/blog/reducing-latency-in-simultaneous-machine-interpreting-with-llms/ Mon, 25 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 I have recently focused my efforts on a major pain point for users of simultaneous speech translation systems: latency. In real-world production environments, it’s not uncommon to see systems with a delay of 8, 10, or even 12 seconds or more, which makes for a frustrating and disjointed experience. The good news is that with…